Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009, Dana Gioia was born in Hawthorne, California. He earned a BA and an MBA from Stanford University and an MA in comparative literature from Harvard University, where he studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. His poetry collections include Daily Horoscope (Graywolf, 1986), The Gods of Winter (Graywolf, 1991), and Interrogations at Noon (Graywolf, 2001), winner of the American Book Award. His criticism collection Can Poetry Matter? (Graywolf, 1992) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2015.
